PowerPoint Me in the Right Direction

Recently I've had a few changes occur in my professional life. The most major was making the choice to leave behind a wonderful position at Conestoga College, and take on a new challenge as the E-Learning Trainer (read that as – we need someone to administer and design web based learning modules, plus since you know Office you can train our staff) for a major transportation company.

We had our employee conference not that long ago, and as a new employee it was very enlightening for me.

For one thing I got to meet all the key players in the company, and for another, I got to spend a weekend with some really fun people getting to know my work colleagues.

I have to admit how surprised I was to find that the company has not standardized the following:

• Servers
  
• Desktop and laptop operating systems (we have everything from Win 98 to Vista)
  
• Office Applications (again – everything from Office 98 to Office 2007 – which I practically demanded and was glad they acquiesced to my request – Does that sound piratty? Arrrr)
  

Many key staff members gave presentations on some of our new initiatives, going green, sales, service, training etc. And I admit to being just a little concerned when the presentations were missing key corporate branding opportunities.

What is a corporate brand you ask?

A corporate brand is the "theme" used in every day communications – everything from trucks and labels to letterhead, using a logo and a colour scheme to reinforce the company name. I'm sure that almost everyone knows the Nike logo because it is everywhere – it is consistent and it never changes (except the size and maybe colour depending what it is on). My point is, every presentation given missed the opportunity to enforce pride in our company by using a customized PowerPoint template for the presentations.

One presentation was orange, another blue with so much text I thought I was reading a book in the ocean, and yet another was green.

Lacking the standardized colour scheme and templates was something I think the company should have addressed prior to this meeting. But to my amazement, I WAS THE ONLY ONE THAT NOTICED!

Now, being new, that's one thing, but as a trainer I am a born observer. I have to be able to observe, read and respond before someone even knows they have a question formed in their brain. My observation skills were working overtime, and I actually left one presentation with a headache.

So upon returning to the office the following Monday, I called upon my trusty Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 and I created the same template in both the new POTX format and the old POT format so that all employees, regardless of their Microsoft Office version, could use these templates to go forth and take over the world!

Ok – not quite…but one day….